The game of Splatball employs gas powered guns for propelling marking pellets containing paint, which serves to provide visual evidence that a target has been hit by a fired pellet.
Typically, a Splatball gun employs a spring biased ball detent for releasably retaining its breech bolt in a breech closed position within its gun barrel or propulsion tube, during firing of the gun. The detent spring must be sufficiently strong to exert a spring force to resist movement of the breech bolt from its breech closed position under the influence of a pressurized gas, such as may be supplied by a CO.sub.2 cartridge, which is momentarily introduced into the breech of the gun for purposes of firing a marking pellet. In that this spring force must be manually overcome before the breech bolt can be moved into its breech open or marking pellet loading position, many players of Splatball find it physically difficult to load many presently available guns and/or find this operation to become exceedingly tiring over the period of a game.
Oftentimes, during a Splatball game, a marking pellet will break within a gun barrel, and this requires prompt field stripping or complete removal of a breech bolt from within the barrel in order to gain complete access to the barrel, as well as the breech bolt, for cleaning purposes. The construction of the spring biased ball detents presently employed in the typical Splatball guns is such that the ball detents, which are carried by the breech bolt, are constrained against radially outwardly directed movement under the bias of their associated detent spring only by engagement with the inner surface of the gun barrel. Thus, when the breech bolt is removed for cleaning purposes, the ball detents and oftentimes their spring detent separate from the breech bolt and may become lost. Further, the force required to reposition the ball detents within the breech bolt against the bias of the detent spring makes it difficult to reassemble the breech bolt within the gun barrel after cleaning thereof has been accomplished.